Three-Dimensional Multi-Mission Planning of UAV Using Improved Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm Based on the Finite-Time Constraints

An improved ant colony optimization (IACO) is proposed to solve three-dimensional multi-task programming under finite-time constraints. The algorithm introduces the artificial preemptive coefficient matrix into the transfer probability formula, which makes results convergence and also reduces the convergence time of the algorithm. Following the principle that there is no pheromone on the path where the ants are just beginning to forage in reality, the pheromone is initially zero, and the ant's self-guided ability is fully utilized, which enhances the random exploration ability of the ant algorithm for the entire solution space. By introducing the variable dimension vector coefficient and the time adaptive factor of transfer probability, the search probability in the inferior solution set is reduced and the convergence speed of the algorithm is increased. Finally, through the simulation on the random map and comparison with the traditional ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, and tabu search algorithm, the superiority of the IACO proposed in this paper is demonstrated.